What's a good light Mencoder GUI besides MeWIG?

[neoufo51]

MeGUI is too comprehensive for me. I just need something that is light, easy to use and I can use it to frontend my latest processor optimized build of Mencoder.

Is there anything like that out there?

[Sirber]

what's MeWIG?

[DarkZell666]

Well, uhm, ... don't take this for granted, it's just an idea I've been having for a while :)

I was about to start a GUI for mencoder in Java.
Since mencoder is cross-platform, it's just so logical to make a cross-platform GUI for it. But the simple fact of having the word "Java" in it, makes it "heavy" by definition.

mplayer/mencoder is capable of decoding/encoding from/to so many formats, and provides such an easy cmd-line structure, I still don't understand why an outstanding good GUI for mencoder (exclusively, not with all the avisynth stuff) doesn't exist yet (MeWiG doesn't do too bad after all but it freezes rather often imho, dunno what sort of polling techniques it uses but ...).

I think it's all a "useability" problem, not everyone thinks the same way, and not everyone expects to have to do the same things to get somewhere (there's some habits fighting and a certain level of automation -not too much, but a bit still- to achieve).

@Sirber: lol MeWiG is a simple and light GUI for mencoder (it offers quite a bunch of features in fact). But it's got it's flaws like the rest of them: as I said earlier, it freezes when detecting the audio tracks or while detecting the cropping parameters (in fact it's probably mencoder which freezes but the GUI doesn't handle that).

[chiklit]

.NET makes programs heavy and people still program things in it. :P

[celtic_druid]

Perhaps a cross platform GTK or qt based GUI?

[DarkZell666]

QT looks good (http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/downloads), I'll have to try :)

Since C# is also cross-platform, I was thinking maybe GTK# would be a neat idea too ;) I think someone even told me that Mono was now able to use the System.Windows.Forms controls, which would exclude the need for GTK#.

Plain GTK requires C(++?) skills which I don't have yet.

[Mutant_Fruit]

.NET makes programs heavy and people still program things in it. :P
Nope, programmers make programs heavy. I've written a C# .NET based BitTorrent client that uses less CPU time than uTorrent (as far as i can make out) and a little more ram than uTorrent. It's not bad for a fully managed language comparing to an unmanaged one.

Of course there are limits within the .NET framework, but they're not as bad as in java.

Mono now has as complete support for .NET 1.1 as it will ever have. So if you want a cross platform GUI, you can just write it in a .NET language and use Winforms. Alternatively you could try GTK#, but at the moment there's no GTK# for MacOS.

[neoufo51]

I can't believe Mencoder has so few GUI options under Windows.

[Sharktooth]

Mono sadly still doesnt support all winforms in .NET 2.0.
2.0 API support

The ECMA 1.0 and 2.0 API profiles have been implemented. To build applications that target the 1.0 API use the mcs compiler; To target the 2.0 API use the gmcs compiler.

ADO.NET, ASP.NET, System.Configuration, and Windows.Forms only contain partial support for 2.0 APIs, full support will only be available in Mono 2.0.

In addition memory usage has gone down all across the board, in particular in core class libraries like System.XML.

[Pookie]

http://users.bigpond.net.au/nexx1/dvbmenc/dvbmenc_beta0.1i.zip

Discussion Thread:

http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=3280&st=0


The "lightest" mencoder GUI - only a batch file would be lighter.

[Mutant_Fruit]

Mono sadly still doesnt support all winforms in .NET 2.0.
It supports all of winforms in .NET 1.1 though. So if you were willing to forgoe generics, it'd be perfect. .NET 2.0 support can be checked here (http://mono.ximian.com/class-status/mono-HEAD-vs-fx-2/class-status-System.Windows.Forms.html). But as it only has about 89% completion on Winforms 2.0, it's not really that usable as of yet for mainstream production. But any GUI written for .NET 2.0 that doesn't P/Invoke non-cross platform libraries will eventually run in Mono, probably in the next few months (4-6) depending on if you submit bug reports on the broken/missing features to try and get em fixed/implemented a bit faster ;)

[DarkZell666]

@Pookie: nice find, I think I tried that one already =)
It's a similar thing I was about to start (though this one is slightly too light for me :p).

Opening a source file gives me this :

************** Exception Text **************
System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.
at System.Number.ParseDouble(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info)
at System.Double.Parse(String s, NumberStyles style, IFormatProvider provider)
at System.Convert.ToDouble(String value)
at dvbmenc.Form1.scanFile(String inputProg, String inputAid)
at dvbmenc.Form1.butOpenFile_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)

and actually launching the encoding gave me this log file :

---------------------------------------------------------
16/11/2006 10:05:57
---------------------------------------------------------
Encoding D:\_etienne\vidz\bleachopening.avi

mencoder.exe -vf-clr -pp 0 -tsprog 0 -vf scale=512:384 -sws 9 -force-avi-aspect 1,33333333333333 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1000:cabac:qp_constant=26:8x8dct:i8x8:bframes=3:cqm=flat:pass=1 -nosound -o "D:\_etienne\vidz\bleachopening.mkv" "D:\_etienne\vidz\bleachopening.avi"

MEncoder dev-SVN-r20604-4.0.3 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz (Family: 15, Model: 2, Stepping: 9)
CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
99 audio & 216 video codecs
success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x1713c2e
AVI file format detected.
AVI_NI: No audio stream found -> no sound.
VIDEO: [XVID] 640x480 24bpp 30.000 fps 1796.5 kbps (219.3 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:3 fourcc:0x44495658 size:640x480 fps:30.00 ftime:=0.0333
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
Opening video filter: [scale w=512 h=384]
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4)
==========================================================================
VDec: vo config request - 640 x 480 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar I420 as output csp (no 1)
Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.

Exiting...
MEncoder dev-SVN-r20604-4.0.3 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz (Family: 15, Model: 2, Stepping: 9)
CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
99 audio & 216 video codecs
success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x1713c2e
AVI file format detected.
VIDEO: [XVID] 640x480 24bpp 30.000 fps 1796.5 kbps (219.3 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:3 fourcc:0x44495658 size:640x480 fps:30.00 ftime:=0.0333
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/8.33% (ratio: 16000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
==========================================================================
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
Opening video filter: [scale w=512 h=384]
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4)
==========================================================================
VDec: vo config request - 640 x 480 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar I420 as output csp (no 1)
Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.

Exiting...


mencoder exists without any apparent reason (and some cmdline options look wierd: what does "-tsprog 0" have to do here ?)

*Whishes very hard he'll have some time to either start is own mencoder GUI, or help someone else complete his*

[misdecrypt]

Why not use one of the many transcoders out there?

Here is one:

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

[DarkZell666]

I personally never got mediacoder to do what it was intended to do ... (and mediacoder is based en mencoder, lame, and all the rest of them, so it's basically just another GUI, nothing more). I tried ripping an audio CD, and encoding some episodes: no matter what it didn't work for me.

Though I've read it's evolving quickly, I might give it another shot :)